


Shattered the Looking Glass

by BrownieFox



Series: If At First You Don't Succeed [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Reveal Fic, Seth is trying to be aware, Time Travel AU, Time Travel Fix-It, i guess?, or the truth is out there talk, thats right we're bringing the milligans in
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:34:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28097748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrownieFox/pseuds/BrownieFox
Summary: Kate Milligan's life is turned on its head all at once by a long-haired man on her doorstep.
Relationships: Adam Milligan & Kate Milligan, Lily Baker & Sam Winchester
Series: If At First You Don't Succeed [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1364314
Comments: 2
Kudos: 61





	Shattered the Looking Glass

Kate Milligan’s life is changed with the ring of her doorbell. 

“I’ll get it!”

Adam pops up from the toy trucks he’s been playing with on the wood floor, the ‘vroom’ sounds having become the background noise to Kate’s reading long ago. She blinks, looking up, surprised. Nobody really visits them. She has a moment, that always-fleeting second where she wonders if when she opens that door, she’ll find John Winchester on the other side with that smile of his that pulls greater on one side of his face, making it look a little crooked. The hope fades just as quickly as it came. No, it’d been three years since he’d last stopped by. He called often enough, but she hadn’t seen him face to face in three years. He still hadn’t seen his son. 

“Hi!” 

Kate heard her son’s bright and cheery voice as she placed her bookmark between her pages, setting the book to the side and standing. It was probably a door-to-door salesman or something.

“Hi. Is, uh, is your mom home?”

“Yeah! She’s coming! I’m Adam!”

“Hi Adam.”

The man standing on Kate’s front porch is tall. She imagined that must be the first impression everybody had of him. It was hardly an original one. He’d been crouched down to talk to Adam but straightened up when Kate got to the doorway. He had long brown hair he’d pulled back and away from his face. There was something oddly familiar about his face, but it was impossible for Kate to place exactly what it was. Standing behind him, practically glued to his back, was a teenaged girl with even longer hair, blonde this time, arms folded tight and hands tucked away.

“Can I help you?” Kate didn’t plan for it to come out so rude sounding, but days off were treasured for her. Time with her baby, time off her feet, time not dealing with other people. 

“Kate Milligan, I’m Seth Wesson.” The man extended his hand and, after a moment of hesitation, Kate accepted and shook it. His hand was rough and calloused. “And I need to talk to you.” 

“What about?” 

Seth looked down at Adam, then over his shoulder at the girl, and then back at Kate.

“It’s, well, it’s more or less about John Winchester.”

Kate was speechless for a moment. John hadn’t called in months (he called when he could, she told herself again) and now here was a stranger who knew him. Nobody knew John. Even during his brief stay here, it sometimes seemed like Kate was the only one who knew the enigma of a man. Seth on his part stood silently and patiently while Kate tried to figure out what it meant, that a man was here who knew John, who knew Kate knew John.

Adam was a little less patient.

“Do you wanna see my cars?” The six year old asked with his wide and curious eyes, completely oblivious to the suddenly stiff and cautious atmosphere. 

“Sure. In fact, why don’t you show Lily your cars while I talk to you mom?” Seth suggested. The girl behind Seth shifted uncomfortably at the mention of herself and whispered something too soft for Kate to hear, even as close as she was standing to him. Seth turned enough to whisper something back at her, soft and quiet, setting a hand on her shoulder. After a moment, she nodded.

“... let’s go see your cars, Adam.” Lily’s voice was barely loud enough to be heard this time, but it was heard nonetheless.

Adam grabbed the edge of Lily’s shirt and tugged her into the house. 

Kate refocused her attention on Seth. He looked past her to the house, but Katie instead walked forward and closed the door behind her, nodding to the chairs out on the front porch. It was okay, she supposed, to have an unknown teenager with her son, but there was something about the man that didn’t sit entirely right with her, that left her a bit on edge. Not completely in a bad way, she supposed, and she found herself comparing Seth to John again. 

“You know John.” Kate stated.

“Yes. Um… first, we’ll need to establish something.” He didn’t meet her eyes as he said that, in fact he was looking all over the porch. Finally, his eyes landed on a potted plant. A tomato plant. Adam had wanted them to have a vegetable garden, but Kate didn’t have the time to devote to something if it was going to be a lot of upkeep. The tomato plant was a trial run of sorts. 

“What?” Kate asked, looking back at Seth. 

“Just… watch the plant, for a second.” 

Kate looked back at the tomato plant.

And at how it was floating a foot off the ground.

“Jesus!” Kate shouted when she realized what she was looking at. The pot fell back to the porch with a thump. The terracotta gained a new crack running up the side. 

“Sorry, sorry, I’m, it’s a work in progress.” 

Kate’s head whipped back over to Seth, who now had one of his hands on his head. He was still looking at the plant. 

“What, how did you, that was-”

“This isn’t a conversation to have relying on your faith in the word of a stranger.” Seth said, and the hand on his head wiped at the space underneath his nose, looking at it before returning to holding his head. “So, with that great note, there’s monsters, they’re real, and people like John and I try to protect people from them.” 

“Monsters?” Kate repeated, still reeling from what she’d seen. “Wait, no, that’s not-”

And then Kate’s own chair raised a foot into the air. Her heart stopped altogether in her chest, and she looked down at the distance now between her and the floor. She looked back at Seth. He had closed his eyes, head tilted to the side and face screwed up in concentration. His expression tightened even further as the chair gently came to rest back on solid ground. He opened his eyes, and they looked sad at her as he checked underneath his nose again. This time, she saw that it came back red with blood, and he pressed the edge of his sleeve up against his nose.

“If there’s monsters-”

“I’m not a monster.” Seth started this time. “But there are monsters, bad things out there. And John has made enough of a name for himself among them to have some enemies. Enemies that might come after you and your son, because they know it’d hurt John.” 

And Kate, well, she didn’t know what to say about that. 

Monsters were real. There were monsters, there were creatures out there, that were real. And apparently they had a reason to come and kill Kate and Adam in particular. John had been out there, in the world, fighting monsters. He hadn’t told Kate that. Not even after she’d had his son, not at some point during any calls, not during his sparse visits. She had to find out second-hand from a stranger named Seth while his teen daughter kept her son distracted.

Kate didn’t feel all that bad about having a bit of a panic attack on her front porch in front of a stranger. 

The facts rattled around her head for anywhere between five and thirty minutes, Kate figured. Eventually, though, she got them to a place in her head where they were settled enough to have the rest of this conversation - whatever the hell this conversation even was. The only movements from Seth had been to tip his head back, bringing it back up every few minutes to check and see if the nosebleed was persistent. By the time Kate was ready to go on, the only sign of what had happened was the dark spot on his sleeve. 

“John lives on the road.” 

Kate stole the reins of the conversation from Seth, gripping them tight as she sat forward. Seth nodded slowly, the sadness still in his eyes but a determination as well. 

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to live on the road. I have a son, I can’t try raising him out of the back of a car.” Kate stated, leaving no room for argument. 

“It’s no way for a kid to grow up.” Seth agreed, muttered almost more to himself than her. “No, you wouldn’t have to live on the road.”

“So you tell me this just so I can live in fear?” She asked, still confused and some of that confusion twisting into anger. 

“No, of course not, no. If I thought you were safer not knowing, I would never have told you; I would never have even come to this town. The last thing I want to do is ruin people’s lives.”

“Why did you tell me, then?” Kate demanded. 

“Because we can take preventative measures. We can ward you, and your house, and teach you signs to look out for. I can teach you how to protect yourself, and what can defend against what. I can help you be safe here…” And there, he paused. The pause spoke a thousand words, as did the look on his face, an odd mix of honest hope and honest heart break, saddness. Kate found herself wondering if the man ever had a moment where he didn’t look at least a little bit sad. 

He was reluctant to go on, it seemed, but clearly had something else he wanted to say, and after a moment something managed to click enough for Kate to say,

“You have a second option, though. One you think is better.”

“One that is definitely safer, but that I don’t want to force onto you.” Seth relented. If he was trying to convince her that he was really torn about what he was talking about, about offering one option over the other, well, he was succeeding. “You could come with me to the Bunker.”

There was a moment of silence.

“... you want me to… what?” 

“Sorry, uh, the Bunker, it’s where I live. It doesn’t look like a bunker! It looks like a house - well, maybe more like a mansion, it’s very big. It’s been owned by people like me and John for, well, I’m not sure how long but long enough. It’s already well warded, and in ways that we probably wouldn’t be able to do, ways I’m not sure I could replicate even with the time and materials. 

“You want me to uproot my life and go home with you.” Kate phrased it and he looked away from her again, suddenly very interested in the front door. 

“It would be safer.” He shrugged.

“Why?” 

And the tension in his shoulders seemed to reach its maximum. He looked like he very much did not want to be there, did not want to actually be having this conversation, but for some reason he was staying around. There was a reason Seth had deemed fit to come here and turn her world upside down. 

“Winch-, uh,  _ I’m _ not good at asking for help. It was something… ingrained, I suppose you could say. But… I have kids living in the Bunker. You’ve seen Lily. There’s also Ansem and Andy, a pair of twins, and Max who I took in from his abusive household, and Jake who keeps close contact with his parents, and Ava who’s all on her own. They’re all around the same age - the youngest being Ava at fourteen and the eldest Jake at sixteen - and they all have minor abilities, somewhat like mine but different. And I think I need help taking care of them.”

“Oh.” And it made sense now.

“I need somewhere who can be there more than I can. I try to be home, but there’s… things going down that are out of my control, and I’ll be gone a lot. There’s no mortgage, or electricity bill, or water bill, but they do need clothes and food and school supplies. I have ways to get money, but… it’s not the most legal, and they deserve better.” Seth went on, now that his real purpose had been revealed. 

His hands had clenched into fists on his lap, white-knuckled, and she wondered if he opened his hands whether or not he’d have imprints of his nails on his palms, maybe even drawn blood. 

“You want me to babysit your kids.” Kate said, knowing it was harsh, and that it would probably hurt. 

“I need help.” He repeated. 

“And if I say no?” She challenged. 

“Then you can have this.” He reached into his jacket, and Kate couldn’t help but to tense a bit until he pulled out a thin, loosely-bound notebook. He handed it over to her and she flipped through it. She caught words like iron and vampire and warding and ghoul. It was instructions, the instructions he’d promised her. “The Bunker’s location and phone number is in there as well. If you need help - help setting up the wards, help with protection and reading signs, help with anything, even something innocuous and normal, you can contact me and I’ll come as soon as I can. And if you don’t want to see me ever again, you have what you need and never have to see my face again.”

He had come prepared. Prepared to be kicked out. Prepared to still help her anyway.

He wasn’t on his hands and knees begging, but it felt like it was a close thing. 

“I have a son, and a job. I can’t just uproot my life.” Kate said.

“No, of course not.” Seth nodded. 

“I need time to think.” To think not just of his offer, of what he wanted from her, but of the reality he’d dumped onto her with those sad eyes of his, apology even as he broke her view of the world into pieces. 

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” Seth nodded again.

Seth and Lily leave, just as quickly as they’d come. Adam gives them a happy 'good bye!' and waves at them as they go. Kate went back inside, returned to her chair, flipped her book open once again. Her eyes glanced off the words, unable to focus on them. 

The small notebook Seth had given her felt impossibly heavy.

**Author's Note:**

> Actually had this one written for a while now! But I was unhappy with the ending - until I reread it and decided it was good enough for me lol. 
> 
> That's right, Kate's here! She probably won't show up again for a few more works but hey, there she is! Originally this was going to be maybe 8 single-chapter works long, but it's probably going to be more than that now. It's kinda grown a ton since I started working on the last couple parts. Like this! I realized I hated the idea of Seth leaving his kids home along so he's doing something about it! 
> 
> Next part is going to probably be Dean and Cas centric :D
> 
> I made a playlist for this fic if you wanted to hear some bops [Right Here :)](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4BAjHlD5f6zt9YYaBKR91S?si=HjvloA0NS1eCU7jeQ2J7Kg)


End file.
